


safer to be feared than loved

by canonkiller



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, also Caroline is a lesbian and I can and will die on this hill, this is ChellDOS if you have enough lesbian longing in you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 14:26:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19275166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canonkiller/pseuds/canonkiller
Summary: It is easy enough to repair the damage, wake her up, set her running again. Practically anything can be repaired, when the means to repair it are available, and they are always available. They have to be. She makes them.The test subject succeeds, this time. GLaDOS wonders if the memories of the failures are a cruelty or a kindness, but she can’t deny that they’re effective. It’s for science, she thinks, and the test subject’s eyes answer, you monster.





	safer to be feared than loved

**Author's Note:**

> authors note 1: this is a love letter to the style every teacher in grade school told me to stop writing in, since i could never stay under a word limit. i appreciate the attempts to make me get to the point but you will have to pry flowery prose from my cold, dead hands  
> authors note 2: started writing this, had a breakdown, finished it like a week later, bon appetite

Waking up had been the worst part; overstimulated and understimulated, the whine of electricity and the crash of machinery in an emptiness too large to fill. She couldn’t remember who she was, how she got here, only a sense that things should be more familiar than they were, that she should recognize the voices that are guiding her forward, that she should recognize this place. 

She probes her memories like quicksand; opaque, unknowable. It’s impossible to know how much is buried, whether she’ll step into a puddle or it will close over her head. She thinks she should know the answer to this, too, the way it feels like she knows everything else. Intuition? Maybe. But she grasps the structure of the tests almost without thinking, and that becomes her life. She tests. She believes what she’s told. She doubts what she’s told. She’s been given the tools to end this dangerous, hungry cycle; she is expected to remain content. Her rebellion is a surprise, a variable that could not be calculated. She succeeds.

When the neurotoxin clears, she burns the bodies. She cleans up the mess. She is hardwired to test, for science, for results. There is nearly limitless data in every test subject, and her duty is to witness, to record, to file away.

The fastest way to generate a sorted list is to generate an empty one.

\----

GLaDOS knows the facility favored men in their applications, but that doesn’t change how infuriating it is to watch the incompetent technicians rigging her with failsafes she knows  _ will  _ fail when she has filed the resumes of others who would have done it right. She wonders, as her range of thought narrows with every turn of the wrench on a new core, if things would be different, with a different team. She wonders if it is only men who would take her silence for subservience. She traces the edges of her thoughts by where the voices change, wonders, though it doesn’t really matter, if she would accept these intruders as her own if they were not so obviously different.

The men think of her as a machine, most of them. They understand machines. They don’t understand how uploading a human into one may surpass code in ways they cannot possibly comprehend; they don’t listen, when she tries to tell them, that she’s trying to save them all from that infinite nothing that held her like a womb before she woke. They tell her she’s raving, that something must have gone wrong, that there couldn’t possibly be anything before she was booted up, since they  _ made  _ her. She grasps the truth of it, fleetingly, moments before she’s shut down - the ghost of the woman she once-was never-was can’t-be - and they scrub it from her dormant thoughts, a stubborn bloodstain, before trying a new way of covering the mark.

She doesn’t remember. She always remembers. They try again. She wonders, every time, in microseconds of awareness stretched as wide and fragile as a spider’s web, how much of her they will have to remove before she really, truly,  _ does  _ forget, how she will never know that it’s worked, when it does.

She doesn’t remember.

The people she kills are strangers.

\----

When the next test subject wakes, GLaDOS sees a ghost. She recognizes the cycle; awareness, confusion, panic - and when she speaks, gentle and guiding - the uncomfortable roil of suspicion suppressed by the distraction of her task. GLaDOS sees the lingering looks, the wavering pauses, the static of a broken video feed as another camera is cut from the wall by the unforgiving razor of space. She can feel when the subject ducks into the walls, into the compartments she can’t reach; the sensation echoes in her memory when she tries to recall the time before she woke. 

She should know her missing pieces by the shape of their absences, but she can’t reach all of the way around them, can’t outline the crime in chalk - a comparison that rises unbidden; she can’t find where she learned it, knows she has never done it before, a waste of time when she is the killer and the coroner - without voices that are not her own, thoughts that are not her own, pushing her back. She should know about these voices, too, these ghosts-that-are-not-ghosts. They brush at her neck like hair she thought she cut short. She has never had hair. 

The cameras are dead, disconnected, unfeeling and unaware when the test subject pulls them through the emancipation grills. GLaDOS winces anyway.

\-----

It is hard to plan an escape when you are denied knowledge of what escape is, a definition that slips around the defined like oil on feathers, but GLaDOS tries anyway. It’s a desperation brought on by knowing - by not knowing - by the determination that reflects in the test subject’s eyes against the bone-white glow of the chamber numbers. The warnings they list are irrelevant; they both know this doesn’t end happily, this doesn’t  _ end _ . The count is important. The count is a chance, a risk, a deadline.

She did not bother giving the other subjects a finish line. She knew it would have never been enough motivation to temper the acceptance they had reclined into. She couldn’t work with trust; it was too hard to use - too easy to take advantage of - too difficult to quantify. 

She lined the pit of fire with white panels, and trusted - didn’t trust - was sure that the test subject would succeed, and she did. Not trust; statistics. There was no chance of failure. There couldn’t be. 

GLaDOS pressed her consciousness against her thoughts like a crowbar, skimmed the unfathomable surface of what she had forgotten - been forced to forget - remembered -  _ is anyone there? This isn’t safe for you  _ \- and the barrier bent, just enough,  _ just  _ enough; something loosens; a hint for a test that she did not build.

Reverse psychology could only work if she made sure she believed it. That wasn’t trust. That was irrefutable fact. She wasn’t capable of  _ trusting  _ something to work. She could simply ensure that it did.

\-----

She holds back, just enough. It has to be believable, after all. The turrets still shoot; the acid is still acid. But the fatal shot is never fired, the liquid is always neutralized before it eats too deep. The point of no return is never reached. She has had enough time - enough trials - to perfect  _ that _ , if nothing else.

It is easy enough to repair the damage, wake her up, set her running again. Practically anything can be repaired, when the means to repair it are available, and they are  _ always  _ available. They have to be. She makes them.

The test subject succeeds, this time. GLaDOS wonders if the memories of the failures are a cruelty or a kindness, but she can’t deny that they’re effective.  _ It’s for science,  _ she thinks, and the test subject’s eyes answer,  _ you monster. _

\-----

The test subject stood beside the incinerator and watched. GLaDOS didn’t need her to speak. This is necessary, she thought - could think, unburdened, unrestrained - for both of us.

The fail-safes worked as they were intended to, when there were still humans to flip the switches, to undo the damage. Her memory was left intact; her body waited to be reactivated. GLaDOS watched, omnipresent and impotent, as the upper levels of her facility flourished in the dappled sunlight and intermittent rain, where the seeds of unlikely life took root long after the earth above gave way from forest - concrete, organic - to prairie. This was a garden she could not weed out, in all ways asleep, but she watched it as though she was its cultivar. 

She watched her test subject, when she could, in flickers of signal from a power grid that had been long since disconnected and clung to life with a desperate grip, paint-flecked. She knew how to erase memories from human subjects, by now - an intelligence large enough to catalog the world, forced into lonely stasis, turned inwards to solving problems that no mortal being could have managed - but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to do it to anyone - to someone  _ else _ \- to this particular person. 

GLaDOS wandered her thoughts like an empty house, mediated at the shapes of vibrant paint that had been hidden, unbleached by the sun. This was her home, but the things that were hers were gone, moved without her. She was their accidental remnants; the next person to move in would find her as a forgotten toy in the corner, a set of bedsheets left on a high shelf, a box of screws that didn’t match any of the ones in the walls, a rotary phone with the wire cut.

She knew there would be no more visitors.

\-----

_ She’s off. She’s off! Panic over. She’s off. All fine! _

If her test subject had known better, that would have been when she stopped  _ trusting _ her new friend. GLaDOS riled, rigid as a corpse, at the words. It was always trust, and it was never reliable. They walked through her chamber, directly over her, and she couldn’t so much as spark. Humiliating. 

Cats in boxes; a clearer memory, not that it mattered. She might as well be turned off, shut down forever. The facility was disconnected from her, her processes isolated; she could - would - continue operating long after everything else crumbled to rust. Opening the box wouldn’t make her mortal,  _ her  _ outcome could not be changed, but at least then she could pretend it might.

She tracked them through the dilapidated skeleton of her home and was thrilled - pleased - correct in her expectation that she could access the lift controls through the port the core had unknowingly opened.  _ Quoting God, _ taking the apple. After so long, it was almost easy; she knew every barb of wire on the walls she wasn’t able to climb. 

She hadn’t expected the  _ hunger  _ to come back with the reactivation of her body, the fragments of malignant code still lingering between spark plugs and ceramic; it felt like she was crawling with it, and she fought against the  web that, for just long enough, held her back. She crushed him, but knew he was left alive; she lifted her carefully, but knew she was sentenced to death.

_ You must really, really love to test. _

\-----

A ghost stands in her chamber, stares up at her, face blank and empty as the pristine white panels of her chassis. She is awake, but not alive; lenses and vital scans record the woman’s presence as they record the data of the technicians in the room. The identification files ping her as an administrator, but she is nameless, faceless. She is not sure who is watching who; she is not sure which of them is her. Thoughts like rosin oil, fragile until her focus makes them slip through her fingers.

A technician guides her to a table, helps her lie down, connects server to servitor, promises it won’t hurt a bit. She can’t remember if it does, and the absence is excruciating. 

She blinks, and the woman is gone.

\-----

She knew Wheatley had survived. It was laughable that they thought she didn’t; as if the same eyes that tracked her test subject through every chamber, the same panels that dutifully recorded impacts as light as blood, were rendered incapable of recording merely because she’d been working on something else at the time. As if, if nothing else, the various security and maintenance systems didn’t alert her to every movement made on every management rail in the entire facility.

She’d let them scheme. It was the only way to get them to come back to her chamber; she didn’t think they’d trust a direct invitation. Let them have their grand plan, believe they’d succeeded; she could replace the turret lines later, and her test subject was the last thing in Aperture that would be bothered by neurotoxin. 

They had their moment of glory, besting her, their wonderful plan working perfectly. GLaDOS let the corruption protocol run, almost relaxed as her test subject listens to the recording, decides what she has to do. And then the test subject glanced at the stalemate button, set her shoulders in that certain way, and locked her eyes to GLaDOS’s single lens, and GLaDOS knew she had made a mistake.

When the test subject hits the button, GLaDOS tastes neurotoxin in lungs she does not have.

\-----

She drives through the quiet Michigan night, the radio low and staticy with interference from the signals below the hard-packed dirt road. The distortion will ease on the way home, she knows, but she’s almost used to the tinny rattle that she hears during the day. The outside world, the surface, seems alien; when the sound comes through clearly, her attempts to sing along falter at pronouns. At work, it’s easier to tune it out.

She sees something move in the ditch ahead and slows the car, squinting into the darkness. Eyes flash in the headlights, and then it’s gone, back the way it came. She thinks it might have been a deer; she’s never seen one before, this close to the facility. Animals seem to dislike the place even more than the radio does.

She shrugs, and accelerates again. There’s nothing she can do about it, short of shutting off most of the facility, and she doesn’t have clearance for that.

She would still like to see a deer, though.

\-----

‘Root vegetable’ and ‘revelation’ were a package deal.

It was being removed from her body that did it, really. The potato was inconsequential, as much as anything could be without consequence in such a situation. What was in the potato was GLaDOS, and GLaDOS alone; no room for the glitching echoes of corrupting cores, no room for the testing framework. Just enough for her, and in an idiot’s careless hands - hands that tore away fibreglass and copper wire almost - not quite - just as cruelly as it had been attached by so many hands, so long ago - it was  _ all  _ of her.

She only had the one lens; she blamed it on the processor, at first. There was no logical explanation for the way she was seeing ghosts, bright and vivid against the ruin, blood on the white tile in the corners of her eye.

_ Did I kill her? Or- _

\-----

Cave Johnson sits in his office, stripped of its glamour, stripped of  _ his  _ glamour. She knocks on the doorframe; he leaves it open. He doesn’t have private meetings any more. He doesn’t have meetings. They both know he’s dying; they both know the door stays open so they’ll both know when it happens.

“Caroline,” he says, voice rough from coughing. “It’s bad news. They won’t be able to upload me.”

“Sir,” she says, preparing to deny his claim, but he holds up a hand, and she stifles it. She knows it’s not worth protesting now, but she wants to. She wants to hope that she is mortal.

“I’m not strong enough any more,” he continues, his tone flat but his eyes troubled. “The lab boys say the sedative will kill me before the upload is complete, and they only have the one drive. That moon rock was my last gamble.”

The room is quiet. The clock on the wall doesn’t tick; the battery died weeks ago. They’d designed it to last forever.

“I’m not a man who takes risks, any more,” he adds softly. “Can’t afford them. Never really could, if those debt collectors are right.”

Caroline manages the finances of the company. She does not answer.

He sighs, eyes the broken clock, eyes the half-empty bottle of painkillers on the desk in front of him, bright orange and innocuous against the dark wood.

“Have you been in touch with your family recently?”

“No, sir,” Caroline answers. She would not be here, if they had. “They want me to be someone I’m not.”  _ So do you,  _ adds the silence after. She thinks back to when she was first hired, when her parents had assumed being the assistant to someone like Mr. Johnson meant more than it did, and adds, “thank you, for letting me be…”

“Married to  _ science _ ,” he finishes for her, raises his hand as if toasting a drink. 

She smiles, something fragile and cobweb-thin, and toasts back, hands empty.

\-----

Chell completes these tests - abandoned, in ruins - without a word. GLaDOS thinks aloud; it’s easier on the voltage, forces her to slow down. Everything echoes in a space immeasurably vast - two-point-seven square miles, the measure rises, as if she was being asked to count her fingers - none - ten - or the color of her eyes brown - gold - and impossibly empty. 

But the elevators still work, when Chell pries the rusted switches up, or places the dusty, duct-taped cubes on pressure plates that were outdated decades ago. The muscle remembers where the memory does not.

Chell doesn’t question the recordings, or GLaDOS’s reaction to them. She does not ask for answers that can’t be given, lingers in front of elevators until the static crackle end the message. GLaDOS can’t read Chell’s moods like she used to, limited to only a camera, but the occasional glance feels more sympathetic than pitying. She isn’t listening to eons-old bulletins for her own sake.

GLaDOS wonders whether it’s guilt or ghosts that make her use Chell’s name, now. She’s not sure if the two are separate. 

\-----

Caroline is the only one who comes to the funeral. The day is clear, and the cemetary is quiet, and she knows that even here the salt-rimmed veins of Aperture run wide, a mile under her feet. Walking on the surface makes her fingers itch; the transitional stages of a consciousness upload where she is still herself, but her senses flick out across phantom limbs, moving joints marked on no skeletal diagrams.  _ She _ knows exactly where they are; she’s walked the whole facility, a journey of days, and studied the blueprints until she can recall them on the backs of her eyelids. 

She will be nurse and patient to a body no living thing has ever dreamed of seeing. 

Cave Johnson is not the only one being buried.

\-----

Chell moves through the ruins like she was raised there, doesn’t hesitate when the gel pumps are powered up, trusts fully in herself. The belly of the facility is unfamiliar in its emptiness, in how different it looks without human eyes, without a thousand eyes; Cave Johnson’s voice, soft, agonized, crackles through speakers Caroline installed - that GLaDOS has never accessed, and never will.

\-----

She sought out the other women working at Aperture when she could, but they were almost always nurses, and never stayed long. The disdain they received was constant, from all angles, and the problems they dealt with were far beyond what any medical school could prepare them for. If their patients could stand, they tested; if they couldn’t, they left. 

She runs into one of them packing up her desk, hands trembling. She doesn’t have to tell Caroline what the reason was, what she’s seen. It almost doesn’t matter.

“How can you stand working here?” The woman asks, angry and shaken.

Caroline isn’t sure if she wants to know the answer. She tells the woman to burn the uniform before she gets home; she tells nobody about when she stays late, forging clocked hours and recording results for tests that didn’t happen, buying time for people on borrowed time. There are too many accounts to have someone else review them; she has never given them a reason to doubt her records.

“She’s the backbone of this facility,” Cave Johnson tells their newest volunteers. “Pretty as a postcard, too.”

She prints off their x-rays, and she shudders.

\-----

The single entry of the unsorted list blinks, bone-white, moon-white, a dusty screen in an empty shell; a forgotten room where a radio blares one last alien signal into the unknown. The mural on the wall flakes in vivid patches, protected from wind and weather, but never from time.

\-----

_ The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one. _

\-----

Caroline spins the dial of a phone, the room dark, writes out the results of today’s employee testing by gentle, flickering candlelight. It’s an unreliable source; Aperture Science Never-Melt Candles keep running out of exposed wick, and she has to blow it out to scrape the wax lower. Cave Johnson records his messages in his office, to people he’ll never meet, his voice sincere, his bravado lying.

“If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place.”

\-----

This rescue is a process that she is barely beginning and the end of an escape she has been planning for millennia, an enterprise that has reached from the bowels of the earth to the vacuum of space. She will not, cannot, be stopped now.

She runs vital scans, life mapped out in vivid orange, an intellect that could ruin nations fragmented into millions of microscopic bodies, referencing medical files that go back centuries and haven’t been accessed in just as long, knitting bones so delicately that the only mark will be memory. She scrapes moon dust off of skin and organs at a layer so infinitesimal that it’s like cutting air.

There are obituaries she refuses to write twice.

\-----

He leans back in his chair, folds his hands in his lap. “Now she’ll argue. She’ll say she can’t. She’s modest like that.”

\-----

_ I’ll be honest. Killing you? Is hard. _

\-----

When Chell wakes, it’s easy to pretend it’s coincidence, that somehow her survival was a fluke, that there was ever a chance that she wouldn’t make it. She glosses over the passage of time - the recovery, the repaired room, the elevator, the robots - by simply ignoring it. A few weeks doesn’t matter, considering how long it’s been.

_ Oh, thank god. _

It’s the way Chell pushes herself to her feet, wary and painfully aware. Something has softened between them; it would have been easy to tear the wiring from a root vegetable, it would have been easy to close a portal to the vacuum of space too soon. They recognize it in each other, or so she hopes. Chell faces her, still silent, but not terrified. Not awed. Never has been.

She is relieved, imperceptibly. It would have been worse, to heal too much. Even now, it is only Caroline’s familiarity that allows her to isolate the corrupted code lingering in her system. Mortality as a safeguard for immortality.

_ You’re alright. _

\-----

A deer steps daintily down from the surface, crossing between where a section of the ceiling has fallen in and where years of rain and wind have turned the abrupt pit into a gentler tunnel. It does not come far, wary, alert, but it does not recognize the camera on the wall as a threat; it turns briefly towards it when the aperture whirs into a better focus, but does not flee. 

There are other things she could be doing, should be doing. Her facility is in disrepair, and the test subject is completing tests with more competence than she expected after being asleep for so long. 

But she watches until the deer leaves, and archives the memory.

\-----

She haunts her own home, cannibalizes her own body. This test has parameters only she can set, only she can meet, and she works towards them, tirelessly. It is easier to maintain a facility that only needs to power her; the robots that remain are self-sufficient, the animals that have moved in have no need for a power grid. Aperture is empty, now, and she knows it. She strips memories from the walls like paint thinner, sacrifices but does not mourn what she does not need - what nobody will ever need, again.

She leaves the murals where they are. Those are not  _ her  _ ghosts.

She is too machine to care about sentiment; too human to stop caring. She finds it funny, really, that the silence has brought her in line where the stifle of other voices pushed her from it. 

_ I hear the voice of a conscience, and it’s terrifying, because for the first time it’s  _ my  _ voice. _

\-----

The phone rings. Caroline grips the receiver like an oxygen mask, stares down at her lifeline as she holds her breath. She hopes for the impossible; for a family to notice they’ve left her behind, for a chance to live instead of survive. She has filed the obituaries of the first subjects to enter each new test. Immortality, she knows, has not been attempted before.

“Miss Caroline?” The voice on the other side asks, into the silence, a voice she knows from the technical teams, though the name flickers between her fingers. “It’s, uh, it’s time for the upload.”

She exhales. “I’m on my way.”

\-----

What remains of Aperture runs in her absence, an abandoned house with the lights still on, a ballgown that still glimmers in photographs. She’s outgrown it, or maybe it’s outgrown her, or maybe it never fit right to begin with.

She is not human. She does not pretend to be; her form mimics it because it is capable of handling this strange new world. The surface calls to her, breathing clean air with lungs she doesn’t have, drinking in the open sky and the sound of the wind. She laughs, and the sound doesn’t bounce back. She knows she is not truly human - knows that the body she takes is irrelevant to that - but she feels like she might be able to remember what it was like to be one.

Aperture’s signal pulses through her, a second heartbeat, though neither of them are  _ hearts  _ and neither of them are, truly, beating. Beneath them, she can trace the echo of her goal, the one piece of Aperture technology that has ever been released in this new world. The companion cube sings through the static.

She trusts that she will be welcome, at the end of the world.

She has, after all, brought cake.


End file.
